


a rope in hand

by gedsparrowhawk (FaceChanger)



Series: like real people do [1]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, for meira with love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 05:19:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13697682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaceChanger/pseuds/gedsparrowhawk
Summary: Oswald’s mother did not raise him to be cruel, but the world did not raise him to be kind.





	a rope in hand

**Author's Note:**

> title from From Eden by hozier

_to the strand, a picnic planned for you and me /  
_ _a rope in hand for your other man to hang from a tree_

\--

Life is, as a rule, unkind to men like Oswald. He learns this early. The world has a way of taking, and taking—because those poor and different, who don’t look or talk quite right, owe payment just to scrape by. Men like Oswald either lose everything and die alone, as poor as they came into this world, or they learn to take for themselves by the cunning of their mind what they can’t win by hard work, and by the sharpness of their teeth what they can’t get by their wits. Oswald’s mother did not raise him to be cruel, but the world did not raise him to be kind.

He’s so certain at first. He waits and waits, practicing out loud and in his head how he’ll say it. He’s sure that Ed—Ed who told him he would do anything for him, Ed who already has done so much for him—will feel the same. It can’t be coincidence that Ed appeared out of the woods and saved him, or that Ed is the first person since his mother died who cares about Oswald for Oswald’s sake alone.

The food on the plates goes cold, and Ed does not come home. Oswald begins to fear the worst. He knows already that his feelings for Ed are his weakness, and if someone were to see that they could use it against him. Patience is not his strength at the best of times, and he spends the night in panic, imagining worst case scenarios one after another. When Ed comes home at last, Oswald’s relief washes over his frayed nerves like absolution. For a brief moment, he’d feared he wouldn’t be allowed this, that he won’t be allowed to love.

He should have known better than to think that the world might be kind enough to give him this.

Ed tells him about Isabella, his face bright. Oswald sees the happiness written across all of him, and he hates it because none of it is for him. Something dark and cruel clenches around his heart and squeezes.

After Ed leaves to go to bed because he’s spent the entire night with Isabella, Oswald begins to plan. It is the only thing he really knows how to do.

If he can’t have what he wants freely, he will find a way to take it.

He is not a selfish man, he tells himself, when he meets Isabella and warns her that the last woman looked just like her. She has the right to know what she is getting into, and if it happens to benefit Oswald, all the better. If Ed killed this woman he would hate himself. Oswald can’t have that. He needs Ed. And Ed needs someone he could never kill, accidentally or otherwise; Oswald is, after all, so good at keeping himself alive.

Under that is a darker fear, that gnaws at the corners of Oswald’s mind while he sits by the fire and nurses a glass of scotch. Ed came to him when he had no one else. If Ed has someone else, someone bright and kind where Oswald is dark and sharp edges, Oswald will be nothing to him. He’s been discarded before, but he doesn’t think he could bear it from Ed. Oswald knows he will always a last resort; people will only ever choose him when there are no other options left.

When that plan doesn’t work, when Isabella is, if anything, more enamored with Ed for his violent streak—and how dare she? How dare she see the growing dark and dangerous current in Ed and love him for that, when that is supposed to be Oswald’s to love and no one else’s—Oswald let’s Ed come to his own conclusions. He offers to be the intermediary. But then he sees in Isabella’s eyes that this will not work, this ploy of his, that she will not let Ed go.

If that’s all love is, then he’s got her beat by miles.

Oswald knows, like he has always known, that there is only on thing he can do. It’s so easy, in this town, to kill someone. It’s so easy to pay off the right people to look the other way while an innocent dies for trying to take something that belongs to him.

He watches Ed’s grief, and he knows that it’s over. He already knows how this will end. He knows this is the pregnant pause before the storm breaks. There’s a voice in his head that’s been telling him to stop, that’s been warning him of the pride that goes before the fall, but, like a passenger in his own body, trapped by his own actions and the only way he knows how to live and love, he’s done it anyway. It will hurt when Ed hates him. He won’t be able to say it’s undeserved.

He wonders, for a fleeting moment, if this is a punishment. If he has done too much harm for the world to ever allow him to be happy. He wonders if there was a choice that he missed, years ago, that would allow him to be a man that Ed could love.

Sometimes Oswald is afraid that all the choices he has left to make were made long ago.

He waits for the inevitable demise of hope. He tells Ed he loves him, although he knows he shouldn’t, and Ed rejects him, like part of him always knew he would.

He is in love with Ed, but Oswald’s kind of love is selfish and small and scared. It only knows how to take and keep safe, locked away from the rest fo the world.


End file.
